


This Chill Intimacy

by Mercurie



Category: Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
Genre: Character Study, Community: femgenficathon, Gen, Post-Canon, Royalty, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-14
Updated: 2010-08-14
Packaged: 2017-10-11 02:31:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/107385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercurie/pseuds/Mercurie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With Gormenghast in chaos, a fragile Fuchsia Groan becomes Earl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Chill Intimacy

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: _90) I worshiped dead men for their strength,/Forgetting I was strong_.-- Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), bisexual English poet, author, columnist, creator of the gardens of Sissinghurst Castle and member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.

"Alive!" a ridiculous, beloved voice cries. "_Alive_, my lady! Not, perhaps – ha ha! - _quite_ as good as new, but there is time, _now_ there is, for recovery. I do hope that she shall recover to the very fullest. To the very ripest extent of the fullest."

"Yes, 'Squallor," comes the reply. "Tell me when she gets up." That is all. The other voice is distinguished primarily by its lack of interest. Its weighty familiarity does not sink in until the speaker has left the room.

"My lady Fuchsia!" the doctor exults. His feet tap-tap on the floor, light with glee. The irritating friendly sound of it causes her brow to wrinkle in distasteful response. "Fished out of the storm waters like a pearl from the ocean's greedy grip! How happy we are, how happy we all are to see you still in the realm of the living."

She turns her head into the pillow and rudely pretends to sleep. Prunesquallor will not be fooled, but he won't be offended, either. She wants him to go away and also wants him to stay. She wants the world to go and stay with him.

***

In her dreams, the castle walls crumble. The people crumble, too, and there's no one left except herself. She feels that there should be someone else, a specific someone, perhaps, who belongs in this castle. But they have all gone. Even in the dreams, they've all gone.

When she wakes up, she holds her breath. There's no sign or sound of Prunesquallor, which makes her happy and disappointed at once. The sun is setting, an old tired beast sinking to ponderous knees; its red rays are cold and weak. She feels weak. The flood has sapped the fire out of her and the walls have caught the coals that remain in a narrow stone cradle. Fuchsia is banked; the wind no longer blows to make her flare. Titus is gone and Steerpike is dead. Her father is dead. There is no Earl of Groan.

Curiously, her heart flutters. She feels its painful fragility, a gauzy delicacy that threatens to tear and struggle and burst with every beat. It's the same feeling that swept through her with implacable swiftness when she slipped on the balcony and knew for one thump of a frantic heart that the waters would have her after all. She lets it propel her to her feet.

Standing is awkward, walking even more awkward as she drifts on dizzy footsteps out of the bed. The cold floor under her soles makes her rise to her tiptoes and weave from side to side, unbalanced. There's a window not very far away.

The roofs of Gormenghast crouch below her, piled on top of one another in layer upon layer of aging scales in every moribund hue – brown and old green and gray and grayer. They huddle close around her feet as if for warmth. This dragon's hide has lost its luster and grown clammy. The doctor had her brought here to this distant eyrie, wherever it is, because he thought the flood would never rise so high. It didn't need to. She can remain suspended here for only so long; eventually her spark must drift down to be extinguished on the roofs. She pretends not to worry about falling, but she's already learned once how easy it can be.

"Not like my attic," she says, melancholy. "Nothing like."

***

Fuchsia resists the gravity of Gormenghast as long as she can. Prunesquallor spends weeks constructing labyrinthine arguments to persuade her to descend from the lofty refuge of the tower. _Come back to life,_ he says, _this castle needs you._ Only in many more words, most of which she forgets instantly. She believes the castle needs no one. It only devours without tiring, and it will swallow itself when there is nothing else left. The doctor scolds her, every day more shrill and vehement. She doesn't mind that he also irritates her while flattering her with his insistence that Gormenghast will shrivel as long as she dallies in solitude. He is too clever with words to argue with – she can only _feel_ her refusal and remain hotly stubborn.

Still, he doesn't tire, and comes to visit her every day. She remembers, whenever there's a brief interlude of peace in his verbal barrage, that she loved him sometimes, when she wasn't lost in her attic or teasing Nannie or consumed in a fit of concern for her father.

Prunesquallor is the only person who comes, aside from the servants who bring her food. The Countess makes no appearances and Fuchsia does not think of her. She spends every day watching the sky through the window. She's looked at it many times before, of course, envied the way it stretches effortlessly beyond the confines of the castle, on and on and on forever. There can be no end to its reach or to its breadth of color. The sky has enough fire to keep her enthralled as the days drag by on their leisurely way to autumn. And so she never looks down.

One day the tea on her tray arrives cold and there's no sugar. Prunesquallor seems like a different man when, not speaking for once, he watches her make a face at the bitter taste. She swallows it down and looks away again, pretending not to have noticed.

Still, the splash of annoyance is enough to make her dreamy concentration drift. Reality intrudes sufficiently to draw her gaze down from the clouds to the stones. Shingles have come loose and fallen from a nearby roof. She spies an overturned food wagon lying abandoned in a courtyard and a child throwing rocks at a rat in another. Some vile smell comes to her on the breeze, a stink of rot and mouldering decrepitude.

She flares at last, with fury.

"I hate them!"

"Who, my dear?" Prunesquallor says. "Not that I'm not _overjoyed_ to hear the dulcet tones of lively interest in your exquisite voice, but _what_, I hope you will enlighten me, if I may put it in those terms, _what_ has – ha ha ha! – so aroused your ire?"

She points a clumsy, accusing finger down at the castle-city. "I hate all those people! What do they want from me? Why can't they take care of it themselves? Tell them to leave me alone!"

"As sorry as I am to bear – repeatedly, copiously – the unfortunate news, my lady," Prunesquallor says. "They need a Groan. Gormenghast will wither without a Groan. You are their soul, my lady Fuchsia."

Her soul is something she has never given. Not to anyone.

***

The Countess is not a Groan. There is no Earl, only the girl Fuchsia, and she has no husband, siblings, children. She can't remember what it was like to have anyone. No one has anyone – no more Groans – and that is why they want her. Now that there's nothing left, they want her. For the first time, they _need_ her.

She descends from the tower quickly once she has made her decision, on a whim she declines to examine. She tells herself she's tired of that dusty old room, that's all. Anyone would be tired of it. Why should the lady Fuchsia Groan stay locked up in a dull, ugly tower? All of Gormenghast is hers.

The people stare at her as she wanders through echoing corridors with Prunesquallor at her heels. She's used to commanding attention, but not like this, not these hungry, empty gazes that don't seem to blink or waver. All the hairs on her body prickle and shiver. She snaps at everyone she sees staring and they jump to life like puppets at a show. Her passage knocks everything into sudden animation. They bow and acquiesce, dust what she proclaims to be dirty, straighten the carpets that trip her, stoke the kitchen fires for her tea. They obey her with alacrity, if not joy, and she becomes drab and heavy with sorrow.

"But why can't they light the fires without being told to?" she complains to the doctor.

He tiptoes behind her, lacing and unlacing his elegant fingers.

"Seventy-seven generations of Groans, my dearest lady Fuchsia," he says. "Your illustrious family has all of history under its auspices. The rituals of Groan are the lifeblood of Gormenghast and a Groan must pump it. Without that, the limbs will whiten, wither, and eventually, I'm sorry to say it, decay."

He is the doctor, of course. She understands it with a quick and clear insight. He is sworn to keep the blood of this massive stone patient in its constricted pathways.

"But there is no Earl," she says, almost weeping.

"Correct! But, if you turn your attention to the facts, my dear, you will find, after some thought that there is – there _is_ a Groan."

"But I don't know the rituals!"

She can see the terror rippling out from those words in the countenances of everyone who hears her. They've had enough of anarchy.

***

There is no Secretary or Master of Ritual, so they find a Scholar. Fuchsia half-listens to the doctor and the Scholars quarrel about duty and ceremony and titles and propriety. She doesn't care about the details, but she can feel the castle and all of its dependents digging their thorns into her skin. Light pinpricks, but when added together they can wound.

She thinks of the children playing with rats and feels another pricking at the thought that everyone is expecting her to do something about it. Everyone else has given her the responsibility. She tries to think of what her father would do and remembers his agony after the library burned. Perhaps the condition of the rest of the castle would pain him, too. Not as much, of course. She won't go so far as to believe that.

They come to a decision, finally. She is briefly consulted but, while some of the inner fire that has made her life restless has returned, she has never learned to harness it. With all of Gormenghast's eyes fixed between her shoulder blades, she agrees. Her heart dances its fragile, fluttering beat in her chest and she knows she's about to fall again, not willingly, but not entirely by accident. The weightless days of respite are over and the stones are waiting to receive her.

On a crisp, burnt morning in autumn, they crown her the seventy-eighth Earl of Gormenghast. The band of metal on her brow is far too heavy. She understands Titus now as she never had to before. She hopes she won't come to hate him for abandoning them all – and leaving her his burdens.

***

Her days are ritual. Walk up a staircase, eat a blue egg, visit a carpenter's workshop and draw a hexagon in the east corner with her left hand. The weight of seventy-seven generations settles onto her in silence like a blanket of snow. For the first time in her life, she thinks about the past. She wishes she could ask them, _who started these things?_ Who decided the egg must be blue and not red? Who wrote it in the Book of Ritual? What were their names? All the papers in the library are ash and she has nothing to shed light on the ancient, frosted roots that anchor her.

She imagines them instead, the Earls, who look like her father and brother, only older, each one older the further one goes back. The attic and its games are forgotten; this is the only imagining left in her days. She pictures them until she can adore every line of every venerable face. She can hear their voices. She has no father or brother, but a chain of fathers and grandfathers and more and they hold her fast and forbid her to drop what they've safeguarded and passed on to her. She becomes afraid of nothing so much as losing that chain, the only connection left to her. She binds it to her with ritual and lets it bind her to the castle.

Around her, Gormenghast survives, bustling with a desultory life she half-envies as she winds her solitary way through its veins. The people bow to her and speak to her with love and reverence. The Countess does not emerge from her chambers to disturb the new balance. There is an Earl of Groan in Gormenghast again. That is enough.

Only sometimes when the sunlight flashes off the rooftops and skitters away into the boundless sky, she wishes for another kitchen boy. One who will rise from those sweating furnaces and tear apart the stones. This time she would not flinch at freedom, no matter the cost.


End file.
